Love Ranch: Review

The setting sounds promising: a legal brothel just outside Reno in 1976. And so does the casting of Helen Mirren as the crooked-grinned, tough-broad madam who runs the place along with her whore-loving hustler of a husband (Joe Pesci, in a rug that makes him look like Elvis at 80). But the director, Taylor Hackford, fails to squeeze the tiniest bit of juice, sexy or comic or otherwise, out of the chintzy-libertine locale. Instead, Love Ranch gets bogged down in a super-tired plot about a boxer (Sergio Peris-Mencheta) who's saintly damaged goods.D